Close-up of a botanical tattoo on the inner forearm and wrist, showing three red five-petal blossoms, a red bud and black stems with curling swirls.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red blossoms and swirl stems on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows three red five-petal blossoms and a closed red bud on thin black stems that curl upwards into black swirls. The petals have darker red shading and the stems and swirls are solid black, giving a bold outline style. The design sits on the inner wrist and forearm, with the blossoms clustered in the upper part of the composition against plain skin and a dark background.

Botanical Forearm Blossom Flower Bud Stem Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodgers at Mrs Pell's boarding house on Gull Steps were always gone before the tide turned, which was how she knew they were honest. The man who came in October was different. He stood dripping on the step with a shell button in his palm instead of coins, and asked for the room above the scullery, the one with the cracked sill. She gave it to him for the button and his promise to be quiet on the stairs.

Keep reading

Each evening he walked down to the harbour wall and came back with a handful of the red flowers that grew in the mortar there, the small five-petalled ones the fishwives called blood stars. He did not put them in water. He laid them along the sill with their stems pointing out at the grey, and the stems would not lie flat. They curled at the tips like bracken, and by the end of the week every stem had a black curl at its end, as if someone had drawn them with a pen that would not lift. Mrs Pell swept them into a tin each morning and said nothing, because the rent was paid.

On the last night of the month she heard the stair creak and then nothing more. In the morning the room was dry as a biscuit tin, the bed unslept in, and the sill held one closed red bud, tight as a fist, with a black thread wound round its stalk. She did not throw it away. She pushed it into the cracked earth by the back gate and told the girl who helped in the kitchen to leave it be.

The bud opened in April, and every spring after that the window above the scullery was open in the morning, though Mrs Pell had painted the latch shut. The lodgers who slept there said the sea sounded close. There was always salt on the sill, five red petals on the floorboards, and black swirls on the glass where the frost had been.